In many environments, particularly xerographic reproduction machines, it may be desirable to provide a sheet feeder wherein the sheets are removed from the bottom of a stack. Bottom feeders are particularly useful for feeding blank sheets of copy paper into a copy machine to enable continual replenishment of the stack without stopping operation of the machine as is necessary with top sheet feed devices. Further, if the sheet feeding device is to be utilized for feeding documents to the platen of a copy machine for imaging thereat, it may be desirable to feed from the bottom of the stack to maintain the proper pagination so that the output from the copy machine is pre-collated. In certain modes of operation, it may also be desirable to insert the copied document into the bottom of a stack of documents already copied so that the proper page orientation is maintained to enable subsequent copying in the proper order.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a feeder-stacker apparatus for inserting sheet seriatim into a stack or removing the sheets individually from the bottom of the stack.